A dying dance endures in Mexico

Every Saturday, hundreds of couples converge in a shady park in Mexico City to embrace one another in the slow-moving, genteel dance known as the Danzón.

Many of the men appear transported from the 1930s and 1940s, in zoot suits with loose-fitting jackets and high-waisted tapered pants. Fedoras, graced with a lone feather, top off the retro look.

The women balance on high heels, waving fans to shoo away the heat.

Danzón lives on in corners of Mexico even though it virtually has died out in Cuba, where it evolved in the 19th century from dances and rhythms originating in Europe and Africa centuries earlier.

The dance is precise and elegant, with men leading in a three-step movement, dipping and swirling their partners in delicate but restrained style.

To this day in public parks in Veracruz, Mérida and Mexico City, as well as in ballrooms in other cities, fans of the dance turn out by the hundreds, while bands known as danzóneras – replete with marimbas, trumpets, drums and percussion instruments made from gourds and known as guiros – coax the music forth.

“See that guy with the hat with the feather in it? They are called pachucos. They dress like they are from the 1940s,” Vicente Carranza Navarro said as he took a break in Mexico City's Parque Ciudadela, where Danzón is played every Saturday.

Pachuco is an old-school Mexican slang term referring to a style of dress developed in northern Mexico and in El Paso, Texas, more than six decades ago. A basic staple is the fedora with the lone feather.

“I have been doing Danzón for 45 years,” said Carranza, 63, who wore a blue guayabera, the loose-fitting, squaretail shirt commonly worn in the Caribbean and along Mexico's Gulf Coast.

The park was filled with people in their 60s and 70s – or older – but a smattering of young people, and even children, mixed in.

“My mom would come here and bring me along, so I started to learn,” said Carla Bocanegra, 23, whose partner wore an elegant white striped suit and a Panama hat. “I come all Saturdays, every last one.”

Danzón developed in Cuba in the mid-1800s with roots in the English line dance known as Contra dance and the French square dancelike quadrille, two styles that arrived in Cuba from British invaders and French colonists fleeing the Haitian Revolution. The dance forms blended with African rhythms to make a fusion of African and European movement.

With its far-flung rhythms merged into a quintessentially Creole form, the Danzón allowed people of all races and social strata to intermingle.

Itinerant Cuban theater and music companies arriving in the Mexican port of Veracruz and the Yucatán city of Mérida brought Danzón with them.

“They'd play in the parks and on the wharves,” said José Luis Ceron Mireles, a sociologist and expert on Danzón. “People danced in the open air.”

As the decades passed, other dance forms evolved in Cuba, such as the mambo, cha-cha and salsa. Danzón took root and grew in Mexico.

“The triumph of Danzón has come outside its country of origin,” Ceron said. “It's only in Mexico where the Danzón carries on.”

By the 1920s, after Mexico's revolution, times had changed, and ballroom salons opened in the capital that brought a true explosion of Danzón, especially in the city's premier venue, Salon Mexico, where throngs lined up to enter its multiple ballrooms. Cuban and Mexican musicians filled the dance halls.

Mexican musicians began to add their elements, and the physical movements varied. Unlike Cuban dancers, who embrace one another more closely, Mexican dancers move at greater distances and with more delicacy.

Victims of economic change, ballrooms began to close in the 1970s and 1980s as families stayed home or chose other entertainment options. But the 1991 movie “Danzón” – telling the story of a telephone operator who lived for her work, her daughter and Danzón in the Salon Colonia ballroom – helped revive the dance.

Some experts see Danzón inevitably falling by the wayside, ignored by youth wearing earbuds, exposed to MTV and oblivious to the rhythms of Mexico's past.

“Unfortunately, new generations imbued with other types and genres of music don't know this music,” said Benjamin Muratalla, deputy director of the Fonoteca, a national archive of popular music and street sounds in Mexico.“They think that it's only for their grandparents and old people.”

Some better-educated young Mexicans, though, embrace traditional culture, from the drinking of mescal (a distilled alcohol made from the maguey plant) to forms of music. One of the better danzónera bands is La Playa, comprising mainly younger musicians, Ceron said.

But without ballrooms for support, probably fewer than 40 professional Danzón bands remain, he said, and few are composing new songs with contemporary themes.

“They keep playing the same 50 songs we've always heard,” Ceron said. “If the Danzón groups go by the wayside, then Danzón is over.”

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